


Loss Ficlet: Carte Blanche

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (In Chronological Order) [38]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M, Modern Era, NSFW, foreplay at a picnic table, jamie x claire, sex in a heatwave, sex in a pool, sex on a hike
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-21 09:07:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19999405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: Jamie and Claire leave Edinburgh on a short weekend holiday to avoid a crushing heatwave in Edinburgh, and end up making the most *wink* of their time together.





	Loss Ficlet: Carte Blanche

**Author's Note:**

> There are two precursors to this ficlet: 180 seconds (June Summer of Smut ficlet) and toys. Neither are required reading, but this part references things from both ficlets. Both are listed on my AO3 profile.

##  **LOSS FICLET  
** **_CARTE BLANCHE  
_****JULY 2019**

The entirety of Europe was roasting in a seemingly interminable heatwave.

“ _Bloody climate change_. _”_

It had been our constant refrain over the preceding four-and-a-half days as we shared ice packs in bed, whined about condensation-dampened sheets, and did our damnedest not to touch one another.

Rather than face down the prospect of sweating through another night without air conditioning and sharing a solitary oscillating fan, Jamie and I were fleeing the city to a rental cottage at the base of a mountain in the Highlands. We were both living with the vague ( _and perhaps vain_ ) hope that _north_ ( _anywhere, just north_ ) would be cool enough that we wouldn’t spend the weekend learning the sensation of our internal organs roasting.

And that is how this story begins. The story of how Jamie and I conceived our first child.

Late Friday morning, as the temperature in Edinburgh roared past twenty-nine degrees, we both ached to put distance between ourselves and home ( _partly so we could comfortably eliminate the distance between ourselves_ ). I was furiously packing the car like we were attempting to outrun some sort of incurable zombie pandemic when Jamie arrived home from an abbreviated workday.

Stepping out of his car, he loosened his tie and raked a hand through his hair like something out of a mid-afternoon soap opera – _too chiseled, a little undone, the best parts of him glued together with a lazy smile_.As he fished his briefcase out of the backseat, he commented, “I didna appreciate the air conditioning in my car until this week.”

When he attempted to kiss me I ducked, shaking my head. “I’m _hot_ and _gross_.”

Grumbling, he grabbed my hand and brought it to his lips. “I like ye a wee bit sweaty.”

“Well, that’s how you’ll have me. _Sweaty_. Get changed, round up your dog, and let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Where did ye pick up _that_ colloquialism?”

I wrinkled my nose as he explained the etiology of the phrase ( _something about old Western movies being based in Dodge City, Kansas, that I only half-listened to_ ) before accusing him of mansplaining. He huffed and rolled his eyes, stripping off his tie. When asked to apologize, he inquired if forgiveness would be his if he did. And we simultaneously blurted out our answers ( _“yes” and “of course”_ ). The disagreement fizzled as quickly as it flared.

And then, at the conclusion of our mild driveway disagreement, my husband ( _ever the cool cucumber_ ) said, “Ye should bring… _it_ along.”

Kneeling on a cooler and doing my damnedest to Tetris our belongings in the boot alongside an oversized dog bed ( _one that a somnolent Buffalo Bill would surely ignore in lieu of some cool tile surface_ ), I stared dumbly at Jamie over my shoulder. A bead of sweat meandered down my forehead, dribbled into my eye, and I cursed, blinking hard until the salty burn subsided. With a final victorious shove, I managed to get the latch secured over the overpacked bulk. “What else are you thinking we need? Because not much more’ll fit in this car, soldier.”

“Not in the _car_ …”

My heart skipped a beat at the look in his eyes, one that said far more than his ambiguous suggestion had.

 _It_.

( _Boxed in the type of tan cardboard that is suspicious by virtue of its nondescript plainness, my purchase from Geillis’s Smitten Britain Kittens divorce party had sat unopened for a week. However, just that morning before work, Jamie had carefully unwrapped said box with the kind of cautiousness I had previously ascribed only to surgical residents and airport employees handling suspicious, unmarked, abandoned packages._

_“It” was born of black tissue paper and looked rather unassuming: a pliable C-shaped thing that fluttered gently against his palm. Like a rated-R butterfly emerging from its chrysalis after a winter’s long slumber._

_“I suppose this part goes…” He widened his eyes, cast a look down my body, and captured his tongue between his teeth in a way that made me want to beg him to skive off work (to stay, to keep me entertained, to love me before the heat made human affection unpalatable). His tongue (that delicious beast) slithered back into his mouth, clicking before he inquired, “And then… this part outside?”_ )

_I nodded, watched him darken, and explained that he could control It with his mobile.)_

The idea of bringing along an _accessory_ didn’t _truly_ bother me ( _weekend getaways generally involved no small amount of both making love and its cruder cousin – fucking_ ), so I just shrugged and said he should grab _It_ ( _capital “I”_ ).

Jamie took exception to the suggestion, firmly molding his front to my back. “Wi’ the heat, I havena touched ye in _days_ , Claire, and we’re about to be in car air conditioning. We dinna need to _wait_ for fun.”

My mouth went dry and my knees wobbled as he caught my earlobe with his teeth, molded me to him like a second skin. I slurred “ _uhhuh_ ” and reached blindly to touch the back of his neck ( _his hair had been recently clipped close, but the curls were still long enough to loop around my knuckles_ ).

“Go get _It_.” His hand descended to my hip and sought skin between my shorts and top. “Wear it on our ride up north.”

A garbled series of unintelligible words I meant to stand in for “ _the neighbors are outdoors_ ” made him laugh ( _it rose up through his belly, into his chest, and out in a warm stream of breath against my temple_ ). He tilted his head, looked to the neighbors who were blissfully preoccupied with _something or another_.

“ _And_?”

“ _And_ ,” I started, swallowing hard and psychically locating my wits ( _scattered and dismembered as they were_ ), “we don’t have time for you to _finish_ what you’re starting.”

Humming, he pulled back. “Then ye best get yerself _dressed_ for the occasion.”

“You are truly _insufferable_ sometimes,” I mumbled, my voice rising into a shriek as he gave my arse a firm smack.

Inside he swiped a t-shirt and shorts from the laundry. I rescued _It_ from its countertop resting spot. Jamie followed me into the powder room.

“Are you going to _watch_?” I hissed, feeling quite foolish as I lowered my shorts and knickers, turning my back to him.

“Ye’d ‘ave shut the door if ye didna want an audience.”

“Oh for Christ’s _sake_ ,” I grumped, exasperated as I lifted one foot onto the toilet seat and got to business.

“Yer arse looks bonnie right now.”

“The one above my thighs or the one I _married_?” I smirked despite myself, biting my lower lip and adjusting to the new addition to my anatomy ( _flat and velvety inside, it curved externally with a promising snugness_ ). 

“Och, aye, weel… _both_.”

I looked at _it_ in the mirror for a moment, and pumped some soap into my hands, attempting to sound light. “Tell me about your day.”

“Was bored knowing that _this_ is what I was coming home to.” He was unbuttoning his shirt, watching intently as I crouched to gather the puddle of my abandoned clothing. “This’s more than made up for the tedium.”

I couldn’t help but laugh as I passed him, reveling in his sharp intake of breath when I bent at the waist to pick up _his_ discarded clothes.

Naked from the waist down, I felt his eyes on me as I walked upstairs to change clothes and well after we were no longer confined to the powder room. Though I half expected him to tag along to our bedroom, leaving the heat in the rearview mirror was apparently enough of an incentive to dispatch any of Jamie’s more amorous intentions ( _or my own, for that matter_ ).

On the road we consumed significant amounts of iced coffee ( _something Jamie had somehow made it to the age of thirty-four without trying_ ), listened to music ( _my eyes narrowing when he asked if I had enough black eyeliner on to sing early-2000’s Avril Lavigne before he laughed and joined in_ ), and paid undue attention to Buffalo Bill’s wellbeing ( _he slept through it all, poised with feet skyward and the air conditioning vent aimed at his gaping mouth_ ).

We stopped for a late lunch halfway to the cottage. As Jamie popped into the sandwich shop with explicit instructions to find me an egg mayo sandwich and the iciest Fanta in the history of the United Kingdom, I fulfilled the mission Jamie gave me ( _with an authorization to “use any violence necessary, Sassenach”_ ) to stake claim to a vacant picnic table.

Scrolling aimlessly through social media ( _and engaging in some shameless judgment of random people who teased me in secondary school_ ) it hit me.

_A deep, pulsing wave that rose from between my legs and straight into my guts._

I shrieked, folding over as I inhaled sharply. My senses fractured like glass on concrete ( _bits of all sizes, some ground into dust on impact_ ). As my vision repaired itself ( _zeroing in on my husband – preternaturally handsome even with the stupid expression on his face, his sunglasses dangling from the vice of his teeth, and leaning against the side of the shop with his phone in hand_ ), I offered a conciliatory wave to the university-aged backpackers one table over who glanced at me with lazy curiosity.

I attempted to muster a glare for my husband, but I couldn’t do it.

I could only focus on the sliver of untanned skin appearing above the straight equator of bronze across his bicep and the way he appeared to be quite frankly _really_ interested in nothing more than _me_ ( _my reaction, the way my spine whipped itself straight as the pulsing burst against me once more and then stopped_ ). On parted lips, I tasted my own whimper, felt the pull of his smile deep in my belly.

He raised an eyebrow, stepping off the curb, and mouthing, “ _Good_?”

Only faintly aware of my surroundings, I nodded, tilting my head as the sensation faded and left in its wake only a pleasantly tender, unsatisfied smolder. I relinquished my hold on the picnic table.

“Range of at least twenty meters,” he commented triumphantly, gesticulating with his phone and setting our lunch on the table before sitting next to me.

( _I had recently declared – gin drunk and filled with brick-oven pizza – that it felt more intimate sitting next to him while we were out to eat than across the table, and he had taken the message on board._ )

Owing to the minor dip in temperature, it was suddenly palatable to touch again, so we ate barefoot, ankles hooked together. We shared a bottle of grapefruit Fanta, and I kissed mayonnaise off the bow of his upper lip with open eyes. As any embarrassed preteen child is wont to be, Buffalo Bill groaned under the table to make known his position that his parents’ public display of affection was utterly humiliating.

Jamie finished eating first and seized the opportunity to trace concentric circles on my inner thigh while we discussed the droll incidentals of adult life. ( _His annoyance at his office’s replacement of the soda vending machine with a selection of sparkling waters. His annoyance with_ me _for praising the move from a public health standpoint while hypocritically pouring a soda down my throat. The dog’s new prescription diet for bladder stone prevention. And, finally, whether we needed an ice maker – my opinion being the more practical approach that ice was free and well within reach using our own freezer; his plainly inferior argument rested on the assertion that I was habitually unreliable at refilling the trays_.)

As we finished our lunch, the picnic area had mostly cleared out. After casting a look about, Jamie looked at me meaningfully as he reached for his phone. “Think ye can stay quiet?”

“Is that a _dare_ , Mr. Fraser?” I batted my eyelashes, polishing off the last of our Fanta with a smack of my lips.

He licked his lips, gaze meandering down to my breasts and then back up to rest on my mouth. Had he been anyone other than my husband, the look would have been lecherous. From him, it made my insides turn to freshly-spun cotton candy – ready to melt, diaphanous to touch. If my eyes’ silent plea could take a form, it would’ve been a Disney heroine swinging from the eaves of a clocktower, singing _‘challenge me, take your best shot_ ’ in a light-footed soprano tone.

“Aye, Sassenach.” He made no effort to throw a cloak over his exasperation. “It’s a dare.”

“I didn’t get to _pick_ if I wanted a truth or dare, though,” I whined, studiously overseeing his search for the right app on his phone. “Maybe I would’ve chosen _truth_.”

“We have a two-hour car ride for _truth_ , and I’m storing all I want to know about ye for the time being–”

( _he tapped his temple, narrowed his eyes_ )

“–right here. No need for me to hear any _truths_ other than the wee noises ye’ll make wi’ yer _toy_.”

“ _Careful_ , my lad. A wife might conclude you only want _a warm body_ , any warm body.”

“A dare is _much_ more interesting to me by virtue of the fact that my wife – my _incredible_ and _adventurous_ wife wi’ her perfect, sweaty, warm body – has a remote-controlled vibrator on her g-spot right now.”

“Such graphic language to use in full daylight and in _public_.” I felt a furious blush surge into existence beneath the slight sunburn coloring my cheeks and ached ( _deep in my belly_ ) even though he hadn’t actually _done_ anything yet.

“It’s no’ _graphic_ , it’s factually accurate. Yer wee purchase is nestled _exactly_ where it is and g-spot’s a _scientific_ –”

“–it’s not _really_ a scientific term, it’s shorthand for Gräfenberg-spot, and _–_ ”

( _his finger hovered over the screen, requiring only the slightest twitch to throw me into an absolute frenzy; I immediately regretted piping up_ )

“–are ye _really_ going to leach the _fun_ out of this with _doctor-speak?_ ”

I shook my head, biting my lip as he continued scrolling.

“And it’s not like I used the ‘p’-word–”

“–I swear to _God_ , James Fraser, if you say _that_ word, I am not above slapping you in public and leaving you here to find your own ride home–”

Though my interruption was verbal, his was decidedly baser, more intimate.

 _A low rolling. Like waves lapping the shore_.

I grabbed his hand, wove my fingers through his, squeezed.

“Describe how it feels.”

 _A breath before my answer, thumbnail scraping the inside of his palm_.

“I’m genuinely curious, _mo nighean donn_.”

 _Quivering, turning my guts to ruffles_.

“Gentle.”

He hummed.

I opened my eyes, attempted to keep my mouth shut as I swallowed, breathed through my nose.

He wet his lips. As if by instinct, I wet my own lips in response.

 _Another breath, a blink that cast the world into shadow for perhaps a moment too long_.

“ _Deep_.”

“And… good?” he prodded hopefully with the inquisitiveness of a nosy child, tucking a curl behind my ear and using his thumb and forefinger to turn my chin just enough so I was facing him.

I mumbled an affirmative-sounding noise, concentrating on the smattering of stubble along his jaw ( _how it would feel against my cheek, beneath my tongue, under eager digits, along the greedy, sensitive skin of my inner thigh_ ). It was like he’d _planned_ this ( _to look his absolute sexiest_ ). I tucked my chin low, attempting to restrain the noise building in my lungs, and studied his left forearm ( _the contrast between my too-pale and bronzed skin irrefutable evidence that he failed to abide by my rule that he apply sunscreen before running_ ).

His muscles moved like biology’s most perfect choreographed dance as he tightened his grip on my hand. “Still good?”

“What do you think?” I exhaled, tracing our tangled fingers with my free hand as I dropped my head sideways to look at the traffic jam of our phalanges.

“More?” He asked it in earnest, his eyes again searching the mostly-empty picnic area.

I nodded but stayed silent so as not to further disrupt my uneven breathing.

He tapped his phone’s screen.

The waves intensified, became intermittent.

Though I felt particularly inarticulate, I mustered the words to blaspheme the Lord ( _Jesus H. Christ, my God_ ), disparage his mother ( _you son of a bitch_ ), and spit out a chant that would be censored on television ( _fuck, fuck, fuck_ ).

I tightened my grip.

He hissed reflexively ( _“ifrinn, Claire_ ”) before chuckling. “If this is any preview of what I’m in for when ye go into labor someday ye’ll break my fuckin’ hand.”

Holding my breath, I felt the slow burn of his expression being branded on my memory, and shook my head. In the space between the vibration, I whispered, “I dislike you _immensely_ you right now, but I’m sure _that_ will inspire a different kind of dislike.”

“Yeah?” he breathed, his maddening, smirking lips begging for a kiss that I happily provided, breathing my own ‘ _yeah_ ’ into his mouth.

The scientific imperative of _us_ commanded me to lean into him. The very _chemistry_ of my body belonged to him – each colliding molecule, every chain reaction, all the chemicals that animated my biology.

I needed to kiss him, and he proved to be a cooperative subject – allowing my tongue to pass uninvited through his lips, to sample the flavor of the roof of his mouth and permitting my teeth to sink into the swell of his lower lip, to tug, to release. He held our joined hands down to the table with his free hand when he pulled a hair’s breadth back from my mouth.

“Do ye want to… _finish_?” He had identified with precision the flashpoint – the moment where I wouldn’t ( _couldn’t_ ) turn back from the feeling, where my own traitorous anatomy would pitch me headlong over the edge. “We can go to the car… or off to that wee meadow, and I can clamp my hand over yer noisy maw.”

I made a gaspy little noise, snorted indelicately at his _plainly_ absurd proposals, and shook my head. “No. Let’s wait. I don’t want you to miss out on the fun.”

He released our hands, tapped his phone, and the pulsing stopped.

I exhaled, bowed my head, and closed my eyes.

“Are ye _praying_?” he laughed.

My voice sounded _far_ more fragile than I felt when I responded, “ _Something_ like that.”

After kissing the back of my hand, he extricated himself from our tangle of fingers and reached for the white paper bag. “Want to share cake?”

“ _What_?”

He extracted a transparent plastic container with the most perfect looking layered cake I had ever seen. “Victoria’s sponge, Sassenach? To feed yer _hunger_?”

 _His tone_ ( _the blatant double entendre_ ) and _face_ ( _the slow, sleepy bedroom eyes_ ) were almost enough to make me scream.

“ _No_ ,” I mumbled, lowering my head to the edge of the picnic table, perhaps a bit overcome ( _and also a little woozy from the unsatisfied, aching protest between my thighs_ ). “I can’t eat right now.”

“Yer loss, _a nighean_.”

But it took only a few moments ( _while blood returned to my head and my heart decelerated to its baseline_ ) before I was filching nibbles of the confection, and laughing as Buffalo Bill’s blocky head attempted to force a wedge between our thighs at the promise of table scraps.

“What are we going to do when we get to the cottage?” I asked, dipping into the cloud-like icing ( _if I couldn’t come, I’d eat my feelings_ ).

“For God’s _sake_ , do ye even _eat_ the sponge, or is it yer life’s sole mission to steal the icing?”

Sucking my finger clean, I shrugged. “You married me.”

“Aye, I marrit ye, ye bandit,” he grumbled, carving off the icing-free bit of sponge with the back of his fork. “But ye didna disclose _this_ particular peculiarity. Woulda called the whole thing off had I kent yer _true_ nature.”

Ignoring him ( _half-convinced he had assumed I would elect for a car quickie and knowing he was aching just as much as I was_ ), I continued prattling on about the cottage. “We’ll have a fair bit of daylight left. What do you want to do?”

With his mouth full, he said, “I thought we’d take a wee hike. It’s no’ strenuous, but we can leave the dog at the cottage. There’s a wee spring-fed pool no’ but an hour’s walk.”

I swept a patch of crumbs into my hand for Buffalo Bill, shoveling it into his grateful mouth as surreptitiously as I could before weaving my arm under my husband’s. “You haven’t been hiking since…” My voice faded ( _my mind still reeled, however, with the pastime that had fallen by the wayside since his accident_ ).

What I had deemed early in our relationship to be a Scottish noise rumbled deep in his chest. His voice was tight when he said, “I ken _verra well_ that I’ve no’ been hiking–”

“Hey,” I whispered, cutting him off. “I didn’t mean anything by it, just… idle chit-chat… an observation.”

“I _know_.” He swallowed back any unintentional venom that had infected his words. “I _love_ everything about it. The ache in my muscles the next day. Dressing the blisters halfway up, slipping my shoes off in the driver’s seat before I come home to ye. Seeing my country… even the bits I’ve seen a thousand times before. The puzzle of leaving the map at home, ignoring a trail. Arguing wi’ John about which way to go. I miss it.”

“I know you do.”

And I did, at a cellular level, I felt it.

It was his posture when he relocated his hiking boots from the rug next to the front door to the back of our closet.

It was in the gentle bob of his Adam’s apple when John called him to go for a hike and he politely declined with a lie about this or that ( _something he had to get done for me that I’d never asked about, a work deadline I knew to be weeks in the future, a plan that had yet to materialize for date night_ ).

Curling closer to his side and pointedly ignoring the disgruntled groan of our harassed canine companion, I dropped my head to rest on Jamie’s shoulder. “Let’s get there and hike.”

“Perhaps it’d help me… on our wee _hike_ not to think about _what happened_ … if ye wore _It_.”

“Oh you’re _horrible_ ,” I laughed, lifting myself head from his shoulder as he started to gather the refuse from our lunch. When I stood I felt distinctly more uncomfortable ( _unfulfilled_ ) than I had just sitting still, though not enough to demand Jamie make good on his promise of a turn in the passenger’s seat.

“Aye, weel, I didna even get to the part where I propose that ye take off yer knickers for our wee hike.”

I turned and looked at him, mustering as alluring a look as I could with my hands were full of trash. “What makes you think I’m wearing knickers _now_?”

He dropped our Fanta bottle into the recycling slot, shaking his head. “I’m the one controlling the vibrator, but ye’re the tease that holds all the cards.”

More than a little self-satisfied, I patted him on the arse, and said, “Don’t you dare forget it, soldier. Now let’s ride.”

We were nearing our weekend’s final destination when Jamie became rather grave and turned down the radio. “I canna say for sure, but I think that my idea earlier about wearing _It_ on our hike was a good one.”

“You don’t need to _manipulate_ me into being a good sport. I was sincere when I said I would. _Carte blanche_ and all. I’m a woman of my word.”

Jamie snorted and freed his phone from the center console charger as I stopped in front of the cottage. “I’ve no’ given it more than a wee trial run–”

“–you call what you did to me on that picnic table ‘ _a wee trial run_ ’? Are you _mad_?”

He ignored the question, continuing, “I’ve tried to be _respectful_ , but… perhaps…” He fooled with his phone a bit, capturing his lower lip between his teeth with only a quick glance. His eyes narrowed and his mouth turned down. “Do ye feel it?”

I gave it a moment. _Nothing_. I shook my head.

“It worked before…”

“Give me the phone. It can’t be rocket sci–”

And then it started.

_The bloody bastard was a tease._

The vibration was soft at first.

Just enough to make my breath catch and my mouth to fall open.

His voice was full of feigned, shit-eating innocence as he said, “Can ye feel it now?”

“Of _course_ ,” I snapped, tightening my grip around the steering wheel until my knuckles blanched. The fluttering gave way to a pulsing, and I closed my eyes, thinking, ‘ _Buck up, Beauchamp – don’t be easy_.’ What had started as a “smile” on my husband’s face was suddenly described more aptly as “self-satisfied smirk.”

“Ah,” he said, squinting at his phone screen and giving it a quick tap. “Good.”

“You’re going to take no small amount of pleasure in this aren’t you?” I asked.

“Aye, and I think it’s a fair assumption ye’ll take a fair bit, too. Already have, have ye no’?”

I muttered “ _bloody Scot_ ” in response, and he barked laughing, slipping his phone into the breast pocket of his t-shirt.

“C’mon Lord Buffington,” Jamie called, looking into the backseat. “Yer mam’s _verra_ cross wi’ yer da.”

Roughly an hour and a half later, we had deposited Buffalo Bill in front of a fan inside of the cottage and were almost to the pool Jamie had promised would blow my mind. We had passed only a few other hikers – a handful of couples on their way down ( _soaked to the bone and sunburnt, shouting affirmations to keep going despite the unseasonably warm day because it is “braw, man, so braw”_ ) and one pair struggling on their way up ( _sweating, shuffling tired feet, cursing their blisters and plainly on one of their last gasps of a multi-day Scottish hiking holiday_ ).

“Can we stop?” I asked, throwing my heel up onto a rock and attempting to stretch away the taut threat of a cramp. The fact that Jamie was in _significantly_ better shape than me even after his accident usually thrilled me, but today ( _off the marked trail and fighting past unkempt brush_ ) his endless energy as he bounded up the side of a _mountain_ was just pissing me off. Though annoyingly well-made for this type of extracurricular activity, he was also a well-mannered teammate, so he had the grace to look a bit concerned. “Just a charley horse.”

He gave me a little nod, hopping onto a higher rock ( _bloody showoff_ ) and shielding his eyes from the sun. “I love it up here,” he confessed, watching me take a long sip of water. “The air’s… _lighter_.”

“That’s the altitude…” I lowered myself to a rock with a groan. “The decreasing atmospheric pressure is making you delirious.”

If he heard me, he didn’t acknowledge it. “It’s no’ much further. Just another ten minutes or so. And we can swim.”

I cracked one eye as he jumped, landing next to me with an instinctive sure-footedness generally reserved for beings with feline DNA. My stomach lurched. If he fell, I’d kill him.

As I took his outstretched hand, I protested, “You didn’t tell me to bring a bathing suit.”

“God kent best when he made ye, Sassenach.” As he hauled me onto my feet he tugged until I stutter-stepped into his chest. Drawing our entwined hands up and trapping them between our bodies, he said, “Ye’ve got all the suit ye need.”

 _And then the fluttering_.

He had done it a few times on the hike before that point ( _quick four or five-second bursts here and there, enough to make me jump, draw a squeak from my lungs, make me frustrated_ ), but this was his most protracted campaign.

“ _Fuck_ ,” I hissed, dropping my forehead to his shirt and trying to remember how to _just breathe, dammit_.

“Ye _literally_ walked right intae that one.” He extracted the phone from his pocket, tapped the screen again.

 _It crescendoed in a way that drew every word I had down the long line of my gulping esophagus into the chasm of my stomach_.

With shaky hands, I fisted his t-shirt, attempting to pull him closer. Feeling well and truly _alone_ , I permitted myself a frustrated moan ( _one to even an outsider that would have been unmistakably sexual_ ). It felt like an eon there pressed against his chest with my knuckles going white and inhaling the well-exercised musk of him.

Apparently recognizing that his day-long assault had rendered me devoid of all instinct, he urged me back until my spine was lined up against the trunk of a tree. As his hands descended to the round of my hips, I didn’t bother to protest the location of what promised to be a quick, desperate woodland tryst. Tucked just off the trail like this, and with the couple we had passed moving at a nearly glacial pace ( _provided they hadn’t jumped ship entirely and turned back_ ), we were well and truly alone ( _probably_ ).

My rather pragmatic workout leggings were winding down my thighs under his broad hands and caught around my boots before I knew it. “Please,” I whimpered, needing him. He went to his knees to do battle with my leggings. Unable to handle the sight of him on his knees before me, bared as I was, I tilted my head back to the tree and stared at the sky. Desperation crawled under my skin, down each of my limbs, made the curved perimeters of me glow amber ( _fingertips, breasts, toes, scalp, hips, and thighs_ ).

I drew a lungful of fresh air, trying to steady my quaking hands as they drifted to my stomach.

_Christ, it was hot. I was burning up._

“Hurry _up_ ,” I muttered, pressing down as though I needed some measure of reassurance that the entire rubberband mound of digestive system about to spill free from my belly.

“ _A dhia_ , Claire,” he muttered. “I’m _trying_. I want _you_ just as much as ye want me.”

 _That seemed highly unlikely_.

Eventually, Jamie exerted no small measure of brute force to free a single leg and took his time rising to his feet, worshipful fingertips tracing me from ankle to hip. “I’m about to make love to ye on the side of the mountain wi’ yer wee boots on.”

He cupped between my legs, carefully pressing our day’s companion deeper into me. I groaned, guttural and animalistic, scrambled for his belt.

“Lord,” he said softly. “It’s slippery as waterweed.”

I kissed the stupidity of his observation clean from his mouth, breaking only to cry out as he turned his hand palm up and gently slipped two fingers inside of me.

“It’s small,” I choked, dragging down his zipper. “If that’s what you’re wondering. It’s meant to stay in while you make love to me.”

I’d read his mind, and he read mine, “Are ye sure?”

With only the brief blessing of my nod, he did the rest of the work – freeing his cock, shifting my hips, urging the tip home.

In Geillis’s cheesy book club, I’d read plenty of trashy novels where _a look alone_ is enough to shoot straight to a lusty man’s groin. The feeling Jamie’s gaze stirred in me then, the almost-reverent hitch of his breath as I whimpered against his shirt, clawed for his skin, stirred something strikingly similar in me. Of course, I had needed him before ( _and desperately so at that_ ), but at that moment I felt such an aching emptiness for him that I could have wept.

I squirmed as his arms tightened around me.

“ _Please_.”

He pinned me closer to the tree, wedging my knees further apart before urging one of my boot-clad feet up and around his waist.

“Be quiet, Sassenach,” he said with authority. “It isna going to take verra long.”

 _A more obvious observation had never (ever) been made_.

I attempted to sink over him, but didn’t have much of anywhere to go – he held all the cards. The blood was thrumming heavily in my ears (it _echoed the droning, achy pulse between my legs_ ).

His first powerful thrust made me groan ( _still-needy, but completion_ ).

The second made me dig hard into his back to hold on, my teeth sinking into his shoulder through his sweat-dampened shirt.

The third made me climax in long, racking spasms.

The fourth through eleventh were lost to me as I was splitting apart at the seams, scattering, burning, crying out.

The final thrust brought me back down to earth and delivered the warm flood of his own release.

Finished, he pressed deeper and stayed, his trousers precariously dangling below the ledge of his arse as he fumbled, mumbling incoherently about his mobile. My leg , incapable of supporting my weight ( _a vestigial, gelatinous appendage_ ), flopped uselessly from its perch on his waist. For a long series of moments, we stayed joined and silent with my face tucked into his shoulder and his forehead resting on bark. Fixing me firmly against the tree, he finally slipped free and gently relieved me of the vibration.

With a handful of the curls that rested against the nape of his neck, I whispered, “I’ll dream of this for years.”

His nod, sweaty along the column of my neck, made me shiver against him, cling tighter. After a while, he went to his knees to urge my boot through the hem of my leggings. I kissed him as thoroughly as I could muster when he rose.

We walked the rest of the way to the pool with our hands locked together and my head against his bicep.

We didn’t talk about anything. We didn’t need to, and there wasn’t much to say anyway.

Suddenly, the ruins of an abbey cropped a dark shadow out of the late-evening sky, its soaring, windowless arches framing pillow-soft clouds.

“What in the world?” I asked, looking at him. It wasn’t strange to see the oddly situated ruins of a castle or tower or church unexpectedly dotting the landscape of my adopted country, but _this_ was unexpected.

“It was a monastery.” His eyes were lofted, water-blue, and dreamy. In the vast arsenal of facial expressions he had when the mask fell, _this_ was one of my favorites: _unabashed, unadulterated wonder_. “The abbey’s patroness was Inghean of Stirling. She came here after her husband’s death and had this abbey built. She spent her days here worshipping, mourning. She kept her husband’s heart embalmed in a gold and ivory box.”

Stunned into an entirely different kind of silence than the one that characterized the hike from tree to abbey ( _a sated, completed, content kind of quiet_ ), I tugged at his shirt, just alongside his ribcage, until he looked at me. “Come _on_.”

The corner of his mouth turning up into a smirk. “What, _a nighean_?”

“Does this _seem_ like a romantic story to you?”

“Ye dinna think that ye have my heart wrapped up inside of ye, even though it still beats?”

I swallowed, my brows tightening together of their own accord as we walked around the abbey to a pool with water so clear that the polished stones at its bottom were visible. He licked his lips, brushed them across my forehead. “Ye’ve had my heart for _many_ yearsnow, Claire.”

I stopped him, shook my head ( _a denial wholly incongruous with what I knew to be true – I was everything to him, just as he was to me_ ) _._ I brought my hands to the bottom of his shirt, needy in an entirely different way than I had been just a quarter-hour before.

Not just bodily, but _spiritually_.

Once his torso was bared, I removed my own top and sports bra and went to work on his trousers. I sighed as he palmed one breast ( _testing its weight, charting the circumference of one hardening nipple with the flat of his thumb_ ), exposing him and laying my hand over the soft flesh between his legs. He toed out of one of his hiking boots and then the other, sighing as my fingers circled him.

“Is this a bad idea?” I asked as he went at my leggings for the second time in half an hour, cursing as they got hung up on my sweaty thighs. “It’s way more public here.”

As he shook his head, I felt the agitating promise of a lover’s fulfilled vow come alive in every hair follicle. Thirty-six years of propriety were no match for several thousand years of instinct.

Finally bared to each other, Jamie lifted me easily and started down the steps cut in stone. The water flowed up over my hips, and the flesh of my belly shivered in delight as the heat swirled through me. The slick of perspiration along my skin ( _still flushed from our joining against the tree and the uncharacteristically oppressive Highland sun_ ) cooled immediately. It was pure bliss. Tiny wavelets marking our passage as Jamie lured us further in.

“I used to come here as a lad wi’ Ian.” I loosened my hold on Jamie’s shoulders, let my body go slack as he took hold of my hips. Smiling, I eased myself back until I was floating with my legs vined around his waist. It was disconcerting, my back half in the cool water and my front warmed by the sun. There was simply nowhere else I’d have chosen to be than _there_ , _right then_ , wild swimming with my Highlander.

“Always said I’d bring a lass here. No’ any lass. _My_ lass. To see the spirit of the spring.”

“Spirit of the spring? Sounds rather pagan, to be hiding next to an abbey.”

Humming, his thumbs traveled in small circles along my hip bones. “The Gaelic’s _Fuaran a’ Bhodaich_. The Old Man’s Spring, and it’s been here a good deal longer than the monastery.”

“Did you have _plans_ for this lass you intended to bring here?”

“I was fifteen.” He gave me a meaningful look as he took my hips in a firmer hold, drew me closer, water lapping over my thighs and stomach and breasts. “You can imagine.”

Carefully, he tightened my legs around his waist as an anchor before palming my left breast with his right hand. I bit the inside of my cheek, allowing my arms to float over my head.

“Is it too cool?”

He didn’t ask questions, just made an interrogative noise as his curious fingers started to wander.

“I mean… can you get hard enough to make love to me in water this cool?” I asked, feeling a little bit stupid ( _probably keeping in vein with the ignorance of my husband’s fifteen-year-old self who daydreamed about screwing a lass in that very spring_ ). “After we just…”

“Let _me_ worry about that,” he chuckled, tilting my hips down. “I dinna think there’ll be a problem.”

He pressed a careful finger into me, then another. He drew a familiar circle ( _one he’d practiced on our first night together in his flat, perfected incrementally each time he touched me thereafter_ ). Once I realized that I loved him, that circle had become more of a _bond_ than a shape.

Slipping free without announcement, he left me wanting only momentarily before cupping my buttocks and lifting. He surged forward – the intrusion almost startling. At the same time hot from the sun and cool from the water, we were slippery and drifted over each other with barely a sensation of touching or pressure. But his presence within me was solid and intimate, a fixed point in a watery world, like an umbilical cord in the random driftings of the womb.

“Oh, I like that one,” he said appreciatively.

“Like what?” I asked, afloat.

“That sound ye made. The little squeak.”

I didn’t think it was possible to blush, but I did.

“It’s one of the things I like best about bedding ye, Sassenach, the small noises that ye make.”

He pulled me closer, so my forehead rested against his neck. His thrusts were firm but unhurried, well designed to drive us both mad with wanting before a spectacular fall.

“In that desert at night, dying, I thought of those small tender sounds that ye make when I love you. And I could feel ye there next to me in the dark, breathing soft and then faster. Ye give a little grunt when I first take you, as though ye were settling yourself to your job.”

I swallowed hard, scraped my teeth along the shallow basin above his clavicle. “What else, Jamie?”

“It’s even better,” his voice was a hot murmur in my ear, “when I come to ye fierce and wanting, like earlier, against the tree, and ye whimper. Ye struggle to come closer, and I’m fighting the same fight.”

I eased a hand between us to steady myself against his stomach as he continued to move carefully. The soft, slow meeting of our hips and the ripples of water that splashed in breaks against my lower back again and again like a coastline combined to make me feel utterly inebriated on him.

His hands set to exploring, gently sliding into the rift of my buttocks, gliding lower, groping, caressing the stretched and yearning point of our joining. I quivered and the breath went from me in an unwilled gasp.

_My heart in a box of ivory and gold mounted on the mantelpiece of his lip._

I kissed him there, cried out when he bit my lower lip gently.

“Or when I come to you needing, and ye take me into you with a sigh and that quiet hum like a hive of bees in the sun, and ye carry me wi’ you into peace with a little moaning sound.”

I moaned then ( _his name_ ), pled for relief, was granted a pardon from the feeling as my back met rock.

He hitched me fully out of the water, his hands holding my waist.

The sensation changed, dulled somehow with the change of position, though he was deeper, firmer, surer out of the water.

He drove into me then, over and over, chanting: “ _Not yet, mo chridhe; we have time, we’ve been given time_.”

And when I came, hands slipping limp and helpless from his shoulders, my back arching like Diana’s bow ( _the huntress, a Greek goddess_ ) into him, he kissed my mouth, swallowed my sounds, and kept moving as I devolved to become one of humans’ boneless ancestors. He raised my wrist to his mouth, traced the scar from our handfasting with his tongue, and pressed my hand over my head.

I half-choked, half-cried as he finished, hard and hot. His own cry cracked like thunder against the walls of the abbey. When he fell forward helplessly, panting and crushing me, I knew I had served him well.

Three weeks later, I rose early ( _well before dawn, my husband, or my dog_ ). For a moment I stared at Jamie, contemplating curling against his back for another forty minutes of slumber or rousing him to make love to me before work, but instead, I got out of bed. Immediately, saliva rushed the front of my mouth.

Just as Jamie woke, calling my name, I vomited in the bathroom sink.

It took another week for me to figure out why.


End file.
